The combination of cellular technology and modern smart phones, among other things, has created an explosion in the volume of data that is provided wirelessly to users. Various applications including, for example, Facebook®, You Tube®, voice calling, and texting all require digital bandwidth. This data can be provided over various cellular networks (e.g., 2G, 3G, 4G, and 4G LTE) and can also be provided, or augmented, by various wireless networks (e.g., 802.11b/g/n).
Conventionally, the quality of a user's cellular experience has been measured using quality of service (QoS) metrics. These tend to be objective, technical, network measurements and can include, for example and not limitation, signal strength, error rates, bandwidth, throughput, transmission delay, availability, and jitter. And while these metrics can accurately measure the objective performance of a network, network performance does not necessarily translate into quality of experience (QoE) for the user.
If, for example, a user attends a football game at a stadium with multiple cellular access points, QoS metrics may indicate that the user has excellent signal, and that the system has enormous throughput (due to multiple access points). If a large number of people in the stadium are using their phones simultaneously, however, the user may nonetheless experience dropped calls, slow download speeds, and/or sluggish response from various applications. Thus, many users may have a poor QoE despite the fact that QoS metrics indicate that the system is operating nominally. As a result, QoS metrics do not and cannot address some important issues.